In recent years, along with the explosive growth and development of the network and the techniques of exchanging packets of data, they make the appliance of internet grows faster, easier and more diverse, and facilitate massive amounts of abundant information could be available to users connected the network.
Given the benefits of fast internet resource, transmitting or watching various digital content over a network has become commonplace in today's entertainment-oriented society, such as the example that displaying a variety of video, audio, or literary works online. While the transmission of non-material multimedia digital contents to consumers via the Internet makes people receive various information more conveniently, it also can lead to a lower trash production. Accordingly, websites providing multimedia content for watching online must be the importance of the trend on the future.
Heretofore, multimedia files are mostly distributed by downloading files from the Internet, saving the multimedia files in the folder “temporary internet files” until fully downloaded, and displaying the multimedia files with a compatible media player application. However, that is an inherently questionable process due to the easily reproducing ability of those files, and the process also cause tremendous crisis and harm to the intellectual property of copyright owners.
Accordingly, online video/audio websites utilizing streaming technique to distribute various multimedia files are developed, allowing a multimedia file to be displayed to a end-user in a short time without finishing the download. In general, online video/audio websites distributes huge multimedia data to end-users by an unicasting streaming mode or a multicast streaming mode. One advantage of the unicasting streaming mode is to serve many different streams as each client demands different multimedia file or the same multimedia file at different times. Besides, unicasting streaming allows consumers conveniently to pause, rewind, fast forward, or re-start the multimedia file once it has started. However, the distribution of the multimedia file to numerous by the unicasting streaming mode occupies a large amounts of transmission bandwidth. Multicasting streaming mode can provide efficient delivery of content to many concurrent users, and result in significantly more efficient use of overall bandwidth resources since multiple copies of the same multimedia file between any sender/receiver pair are avoided. Further, Multicasting streaming mode shares the same stream among all users on the network, thereby conserving enormous amounts of bandwidth leading directly to huge cost savings, making it ideal for online video/audio websites.
Although multicasting streaming mode can significantly reduce the bandwidth traffic loads, however, consumers are restrained to receive only the pre-scheduled set of multimedia files at the times selected by the website operator. In addition, consumers are also restrained to control the displaying of multimedia files such as pause, rewind, and the like.
The method of streaming media can only transmit the data flow of multimedia, and leave no temporary data in the end-user, so as to protect the rights of intellectual property right owners. However, online video/audio websites generally cannot afford heavy loading of bandwidth usage by clients due to the limitation of physical bandwidth of the websites. Thus, the bandwidth limitation problems to the servers has make the development of online video/audio websites in the multimedia industry to a difficult position all along. Moreover, when consumers watch one identical multimedia file again, generally the consumers have to pay for the same multimedia file again. In this manner, the act of pay-per-view is seldom inconsistent with equitable principles of trade, which also leading to the shortage of consumers' interest for visiting the websites.
On the other hand, with such a surge in Internet usage, it should come as no surprise that its impact on society has been heavy. For example, once internet users capture the downloaded URL pointing to those multimedia files by checking the address bar of the browser or looking up the playing information stored in the media application, they may easily download and copy the multimedia files without authorization. In this situation, the Internet has become the media of providing and distributing illegal copy of digital contents, and also caused huge loss to the industries.
In order to efficiently protect the rights of copyright owners and solve the infringement problem in the Internet, protection systems are used in website servers to restrict download of distributed content, for example, using No-Right-Click Scripting program for blocking source code from gathering, or using a PHP application that requires users to register before downloading binary files, or frequently specifying a different location for the download directory.
However, the protection systems described above is not directly developed for websites who distributes digital contents online. Moreover, the safety of the website can not be guaranteed when the numerous amount and size of digital contents stored in a server are simply only protected by producing a plurality of virtual address paths to avoid unauthorized access.
Therefore, there is a need for an improved method and system for a digital content distributing service to overcome the shortcomings of the prior art.